MacBook Air cracked first in Pwn2Own

Was Safari to blame?

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It was the MacBook Air that cracked in the annual CanSecWest Pwn2Own challenge – with a Sony Vaio and a Fujitsu U810 standing firm in the battle of the laptops.

The contest asks hackers to gain access to a file on the computers to win the machine – with strict safeguards in place that ban the contestants from talking about their exploit until it has already been fixed by the company in question.

It's Miller time...

Charlie Miller won the laptop and the $10,000 as he cracked MacBook’s Air on day two of the contest, with the Windows and Ubuntu machines standing firm.

It is widely believed that a Safari exploit was used to get into the laptop, directing it to a ‘trap’ website and the malicious code that enabled Miller to take control of the laptop and read the file.

Last year’s competition saw the MacBook Pro cracked first as it competed with two other machines – with the QuickTime exploit quickly patched by Apple to prevent it being used maliciously.